From the viewpoint of sociocultural psychology, therapeutic education may be defined as a teaching-learning situation. Hence, attention is paid to teacher-learner interactions, the educational material used to teach, and the misunderstandings liable to emerge from these interactions.
Dealing with diabetes therapeutic education, the study presented in this paper aimed at fostering practitioners’ professional development. It used a method of self-confrontation (Clot, 2009) consisting in recording situations of therapeutic education, and then in asking practitioners to watch excerpts from these recordings and to comment them. Eleven practitioners (4 diabetologists, 5 nurses and 2 dieticians) and 42 patients from the French-speaking part of Switzerland participated in the study.
For this paper, two consultations and their subsequent self-confrontations (one with a diabetologist, the other with a nurse) were analysed. Their specificity was to involve the same child (a 14-year old teenager) and the same educational material.
The results showed that the practitioners made different uses of the educational material and focused on different aspects of the disease. Moreover, self-confrontation led them to pay more attention to their interactions with the child, and to the need for a learning space enabling the patient to appropriate the complex elements to be learned.